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History and Philosophy of the Humanities History and Philosophy of the Humanities History and Philosophy of the Humanities An introduction Michiel Leezenberg and Gerard de Vries Translation by Michiel Leezenberg Amsterdam University Press Original publication: Michiel Leezenberg & Gerard de Vries, Wetenschapsfilosofie voor geesteswetenschappen, derde editie, Amsterdam University Press, 2017 © M. Leezenberg & G. de Vries / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017 Translated by Michiel Leezenberg Cover illustration: Johannes Vermeer, De astronoom (1668) Musee du Louvre, R.F. 1983-28 Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 493 7 e-isbn 978 90 4855 168 2 (pdf) doi 10.5117/9789463724937 nur 730 © Michiel Leezenberg & Gerard de Vries / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 Translation © M. Leezenberg All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. Table of Contents Preface 11 1 Introduction 15 1.1 The Tasks of the Philosophy of the Humanities 15 1.2 Knowledge and Truth 19 1.3 Interpretation and Perspective 23 1.4 Unity and Fragmentation 26 Summary 35 Part 1 Standard Images of Science 2 The Birth of the Modern Natural Sciences 39 2.1 The Scientific Revolution 39 2.1a Aristotle and the Medieval Sciences 42 2.1b Renaissance Humanism: Eloquence and Learning 46 2.1c The Rejection of Humanism and of Aristotelian Science 50 2.1d What Was the Scientific Revolution? 57 2.2 The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Classical Natural Science; Immanuel Kant’s ‘Copernican Turn’ 61 Summary 69 3 Logical Empiricism and Critical Rationalism 71 3.1 Logical Empiricism: The Vienna Circle 71 3.1a Rudolf Carnap: The Logic of Science 74 3.1b The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction and Reductionism 79 3.2 The Vienna Circle and the Humanities 84 3.3 Karl Popper: The Logic of Refutation 88 3.3a Induction, Deduction, Demarcation 90 3.3b Testing Theories 93 3.3c Explanation, Prediction, and the Laws of History 97 Summary 99 4 Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 101 4.1 From Empiricism to Pragmatism 101 4.1a The Duhem-Quine Thesis 103 4.1b Willard Quine’s Meaning Holism 105 4.1c Wilfrid Sellars and the Myth of the Given 111 4.2 The Development of Scientific Knowledge According to Thomas Kuhn 114 4.3 Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science: Empiricism, Neo-Kantianism, or Pragmatism? 121 4.4 The ‘Anthropological Turn’ 126 Summary 129 Part 2 The Rise of the Humanities 5 The Birth of the Modern Humanities 133 5.1 Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of the Human Sciences 133 5.2 Philosophical Backgrounds: Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 140 5.2a Kant: Subject and Object 141 5.2b Hegel: Geist and Historicity 143 5.3 Cultural-Historical Backgrounds 147 5.4 Institutional Transformations: Wilhelm von Humboldt’s University Reforms, Bildung, and Nationalism 152 5.5 Conclusion 155 Summary 156 6 Developing New Disciplines 159 6.1 Hegel’s Philosophical History 159 6.2 The Rise of Modern Philology 164 6.3 Historiography and Genealogy 169 6.3a Leopold von Ranke 169 6.3b Friedrich Nietzsche 172 6.4 The Emergence of Sociology and Its Rivalry with the Humanities 174 Summary 178 7 Between Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences: In Search of a Method 179 7.1 Introduction 179 7.2 From Biblical Exegesis to General Method: Friedrich Schlei- ermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey 182 7.2a Schleiermacher and Hermeneutics 182 7.2b Dilthey and the Humanities 184 7.3 Psychoanalysis between Hermeneutics and Natural Science 186 7.4 Neo-Kantianism: Heinrich Rickert and Ernst Cassirer 191 7.4a Rickert 191 7.4b Cassirer 193 7.5 Understanding in the Social Sciences: Max Weber 196 7.6 Hermeneutics as an Ontological Process: Hans-Georg Gadamer 200 7.7 Conclusion 204 Summary 205 Part 3 Styles and Currents in the Humanities 8 Critical Theory 209 8.1 Karl Marx and Dialectics 209 8.2 Marxism, Language, and Literature: György Lukács, Valentin Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin 211 8.3 Antonio Gramsci 217 8.4 The Frankfurt School 221 8.4a Walter Benjamin 222 8.4b Theodor Adorno 226 8.5 Jürgen Habermas 231 Summary 235 9 Positivism and Structuralism 237 9.1 Introduction 237 9.2 Émile Durkheim’s Sociology 239 9.2a Sociology of Religion and Sociology of Knowledge 244 9.3 Ferdinand de Saussure and General Linguistics 247 9.4 Noam Chomsky and the Cognitive Revolution 253 9.5 Structuralism in Literary Theory 258 9.6 Structuralism and Psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan 261 9.7 Conclusion 265 Summary 267 10 The Practice Turn 269 10.1 Introduction 269 10.2 Words as Deeds: J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein 270 10.2a Wittgenstein on Language Games 270 10.2b Austin’s Speech Act Theory 272 10.3 Michel Foucault’s Genealogy 275 10.4 Pierre Bourdieu’s Reflexive Sociology 279 10.4a The Notion of Habitus: Beyond Structure and Agency 280 10.4b Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture: Fields and Capitals 282 Summary 285 Part 4 Modernity and Identity 11 Critique of Modernity 289 11.1 Introduction: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postmodernism 289 11.2 Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and the Philosophy of Difference: ‘French Theory’ 293 11.2a Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction 294 11.2b Gilles Deleuze: The Philosophy of Difference 298 11.3 Thinkers on Postmodernity 302 11.3a Postmodernism and the Legitimation of the Humanities: Jean-François Lyotard 302 11.3b Richard Rorty’s Postmodern Bildung 304 11.4 Conclusion: Beyond (Western) Modernity 309 Summary 311 12 Gender, Sex, and Sexuality 313 12.1 Introduction 313 12.2 Gender and Gender Metaphors 318 12.3 Foucault and the History of Sexuality 321 12.4 Gender and Performativity: Judith Butler and Queer Theory 324 Summary 329 13 Postcolonialism 331 13.1 Introduction 331 13.1a Frantz Fanon 331 13.2 Postcolonialism and the Humanities: Edward Said and Martin Bernal 334 13.2a Said and Orientalism 334 13.2b Bernal and Classical Philology 336 13.3 The Subaltern Studies Group and Its Offshoots 337 13.4 Beyond Postcolonialism: Globalization and Global History 343 Summary 348 Further Reading 351 Glossary 359 Index of Names 383 Index of Subjects 387 Preface Philosophy of science textbooks tend to restrict their attention to the natural sciences, which allegedly represent what ‘real science’ is. In some other cases, the epistemological and methodological problems of the social sciences are dealt with as well. Textbooks that cater to the needs of students in the humanities, however, are few and far between. The present book aims to fill this lacuna. It provides humanities students with the necessary means to reflect on the character of their field of study as well as on the place of the humanities in the world of science at large and their position in contemporary society and culture. This book neither propagates a particular view on, or approach to, the humanities nor gives advice about how to conduct research. Rather, it discusses the development of the Western humanities and the diverging views that exist with regard to their tasks, character, and methods. These views – and with them the very distinction between the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities – have taken different shapes in the course of history. By not only discussing general epistemological and discipline-specific methodological questions but also paying ample attention to the historical developments that have contributed to the development of the humanities, this book hopes to be of interest to scholars in the humani- ties (both current and future) as well as readers primarily interested in the natural and social sciences. The book consists of four parts. In Part One, we discuss humanism, the scientific revolution, and a number of standard views on science, including logical empiricism and critical rationalism. Several epistemological no- tions that are relevant for understanding the humanities are introduced, including Kant’s version of the subject-object scheme, the implications of the Duhem-Quine thesis, and the rejection of the so-called myth of the given. Finally, we discuss the historicization of the philosophical view of the sciences that occurred in the 1960s. In Part Two, we discuss the emergence of the modern humanities. For didactic reasons, we take the periodization of Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences as guiding: it enables us to clarify the philosophical developments that made the very idea of the modern humanities or ‘human sciences’ possible; to discuss how the development of the humanities was encouraged by social and political factors such as the rise of bourgeois society, nationalism, and the European colonization of large parts of the world; and to show how and why the humanities received a distinct institutional 12 HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF THe HUMANITIES position within universities. After this, we discuss how the new disciplines distinguished themselves in terms of their character, object, or methods from the ones that had already been established. In Part Three, we present the main currents and styles of inquiry within the humanities that developed in the course of the twentieth century, together with their intellectual background: critical theory, structuralism and positivism, and the so-called practice turn that occurred after the Second World War. Two other influential currents – hermeneutics and neo-Kantianism – are already discussed in detail at the end of Part Two in the context of the questions that had emerged around 1900 concerning the character and methods of the humanities and the social sciences, in particular in the German-speaking academic world.
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